Network Performance Testing System Integrating Models for Automatic QoE Evaluation of Popular Services: YouTube and Facebook

Smartphones have significantly changed the traffic pattern usage of mobile subscribers. In addition to the classical file sharing and web browsing usage, social networking applications and access to video content are now a significant percentage of the typical user data traffic consumption. As the change in usage pattern affects the performance of mobile networks, operators need methods to estimate how well the network behaves. The metrics to use for the evaluation of the quality of experience (QoE) are only well documented for traditional applications. In this paper a novel QoE system that automatically captures and processes the metrics needed to evaluate two commonly used applications, the social networking application Facebook and the video download application YouTube, is presented. The system uses a test application developed for Android phones, which report the results to a centralized platform capable of processing and presenting the results in different formats. The system has been used to test those two services over 3G/LTE network technologies. In the case of the YouTube services, performance results show a subjective score very similar for the 3G and LTE because of the automatic adaptation of the video coding rate to the network conditions. Testing of the Facebook application has led to the proposal of a new MOS expression that takes into account the content type being posted, which provides more reasonable MOS estimations than the generic web browsing models available in the literature and commonly used to estimate Facebook QoE.